Her buoyant cheerfulness, however, her unquenchable hopefulness, her innate optimism would not permit her to remain long a prey to grief and melancholy. If earthly things disappointed her, if she failed to find here below the fulfilment of her hopes, the realisation of her dreams, then she would look elsewhere. She refused to be altogether disappointed. With Jean Jacques Rousseau she felt that she had wept too much in this life not to believe in another. Henceforth she began to dwell more and more on that other world, of faith in which her paganism had never succeeded in depriving her. With her the unseen had ever been vividly present.
Her exuberant Celtic imagination had projected itself into the spirit world. She believes that her grandmother appeared to her after her death, and that many important events of her life have been prophesied to her by some soothsayer, palmist or somnambulist. She herself used to tell fortunes; and, at the close of her evening receptions, to a few favoured guests, Gambetta, Girardin, Spuller, for example, who liked to linger after the rest had gone, she would predict the future by cutting cards. But her own soothsaying must not be taken too seriously. For she admits she was glad to take this opportunity of telling some home truths, and giving to her friends useful advice which, administered in any other way, might have offended them. Gambetta was frequently the recipient of such counsel. The cards, for instance, warned him that by a meeting as “diabolical as that of Christ’s temptation on the mountain” he was risking the loss of his prestige.[332] He was also enjoined to beware of women and their advice. Some would dash him into the abyss of ruin, he was told, while others would raise him on to dizzy heights no less dangerous. He was bidden to be a lover and a friend, but to choose only men for his confidants. Refusing to recognise in such warnings anything but the advice of the fair necromancer herself, Gambetta replied mischievously, “You are rather hard on yourself. But perhaps it is in order that you may be still harder on others.”
In the past, the main object of Mme. Adam’s adoration had been la patrie. So it will continue to be until the end. In her pagan days, after la patrie, she had adored the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome. They had represented to her the ideals of a civilisation which she regarded as the highest and most complete to which humanity has yet attained. When Mme. Adam became a Christian the gods and heroes of antiquity made way for Christ and His Saints, and for Mme. Adam’s patriotic soul first among the latter is Jeanne d’Arc.[333] For even now la patrie remains enthroned in the first place in her hierarchy. Indeed, she has returned to the Catholic Church chiefly because thus she hopes best to fulfil her mission as a patriotic Frenchwoman. “I believe,” she said to me, “that a true French patriot can no more escape being a Catholic than can a truly patriotic Turk escape being a Mussulman.” Nevertheless, that it may not always be easy to reconcile patriotism and religion is suggested by the following letter, which Mme. Adam wrote in reply to my inquiry as to her views of the reputed pro-German attitude of the present Pope—
“Abbaye de Gif,
”14.ii.16.
“.... Pour le Pape—Je suis catholique, apostolique et romaine. Revenue aux croyances de ma grand’mère.... Vous comprendrez que je n’ai pas, si tardive croyante, le droit de discuter les actions du St. Père. Mais mes vœux étaient pour le Cardinal Rampolla, que l’Autriche détestait et que la France eut tant aimé! Là encore je dois me taire. Vous pouvez seulement dire à quel point mes vœux accompagnaient le Cardinal Rampolla, que j’avais la fierté de connaître.”
(1885)
We have seen how Mme. Adam’s father had brought her up in communion with the Hellenic soul; how in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon she delighted to fraternise with those enthusiastic Hellenists, de Ronchaud, Paul Saint-Victor, and Louis Ménard. After her rupture with Mme. d’Agoult, and throughout all the vicissitudes of the intervening years, this Grecque ressuscitée, as Victor Hugo used to call her, had never ceased, whenever she met her Hellenic friends, with them to live and move and have her being in the world of ancient Greece. Together they dreamed of seeing established in France what they described somewhat vaguely as “the Athenian Republic.” Together they welcomed the advent of those young poets, “the incomparable Parnassians,” whom Ménard fathered, François Coppée, Sully Prudhomme,[334] Hérédia, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Anatole France and Lecomte de Lisle. Mme. Adam had been delighted when Gaston Paris brought to her salon that wonderful Sully Prudhomme, who from a workman in Creusot’s factory had developed into a poet, scholar and philosopher.[335] Volume by volume, as they appeared, she devoured Lemerre’s edition of the Parnassians’ collected works, becoming every day, she writes, sauf quelques réserves, a convinced admirer and an ardent propagandist of the new school of poets.[336]
The reserve she referred to was this: she could not bring herself to admire the marmoreal immobility cultivated by the Parnassians. “Ils ne rêvent pas comme moi” she writes,[337] “de draperies flottantes au vent qui souffle du golfe de Phalère ou du mont Hymette: ils veulent le pli statuaire, moi je l’aime vivant.”